Sunday, April 5, 2015

The Tulsa Law Review, Book Review Issue

The second issue of Tulsa Law Review's Volume 50 is out and full of book reviews. The table of contents for the special issue can be found here, and a full list of reviewed books can be downloaded here.

"Why are governments interested in the procreative habits of their citizens? Why especially does a democratic government—ostensibly formed to protect individual rights—concern itself with the private activities of consenting adults? These questions could be raised in debates over same-sex marriage or insurance coverage for contraception in the twenty-first century United States. But three recent books on the intersection of family, sex, and the law show us why the regulation of parents and children has been central to the organization of power since the colonial period."

"Bruce Ackerman has done it again: he has published the third in his magisterial se- ries of books on American political/constitutional history. The first volume, We the People: Foundations, made the greatest splash among constitutional lawyers. Its innovation was to range well outside formalist boundaries to bring popular politics into the study of constitutional revision. His second volume, We the People: Transformations, focused on the transformations in U.S. constitutional practice from the Civil War through the New Deal. The third volume, We the People: The Civil Rights Rovolution (hereinafter CRR), brings the story up to the civil rights revolution, which Ackerman sees as the latest con- stituent moment in American history. Among them, these three volumes contribute to one side of a growing bridge between constitutional scholars and students of social movements."

"Goss explains that the women’s movement did not dismantle after the Nineteenth Amendment. Replacing the “wave” metaphor with that of a river, Goss follows the tributaries, where she finds plenty of civic activity after 1920. There was a multiplicity of groups working for both women’s issues and staking claim to broader national issues, such as war and democracy. Furthermore, these groups were membership-based, with local chapters and active participation, working their way up to a national presence that testified on Capitol Hill. Goss thus identifies ongoing, vibrant civic engagement after 1920. In contrast, the period after the peak of the second wave women’s movement shows women’s groups that tend to be professional organizations focused more narrowly on specific women’s issues. Testimony before Congress dropped, and the scope of women’s groups’ claims narrowed as well. Goss identifies this as a loss of women’s civic place, which “encompasses the civic identity on which groups draw to construct their interests and jus- tify their political authority, the modes of collective action that groups deploy to press those interests, and the policy niche that groups legitimately occupy.”"

"“How does an alien imposition attain legitimacy?” asks Nicholas Parrillo in Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780-1940. Parrillo and three other historians address this question in a group of outstanding new books on the rise of American administrative law. Each book reflects the various ways in which American administrative law has been an alien imposition: filling a “hole” in the text of the Constitution that did not address administrative powers; changing the traditional separation of powers of legislative rule-making and judicial adjudication with individualized due process; imposing centralized bureaucracy over local self-rule; imposing the rule of experts over the populace; and imposing one party’s structure over the other party’s dissent."

"The two books featured in this review join the modern trend of revisionist scholarship that reassesses legal history inherited from the Progressive Era. Motivated by their belief that Progressives misrepresented conservatives of the era as mere apologists for the economic elite, the authors of Toward an American Conservatism maintain that some conservative leaders of the era were actually advocates of a philosophy faithful to the Constitution. Similarly, Laws History observes that misrepresentations by leading Progressive scholars helped sociological jurisprudence supplant history as a means of studying and understanding law. David Rabban’s goal is to return the study of legal history to a promi- nent role. Beyond this similarity the books are vastly different in style, method, and purpose."